The Apartment

Photograph by Peter Funch for The New Yorker / Hand Lettering by Eva Black

Louise knew by the new name on the call box that someone had moved in. She’d seen lights and movement in the apartment, which was across the courtyard from her and Martin, for the past few days. The new name confirmed it. Someone had finally bought the place. The name had been typed on a small piece of green paper and taped to the call box beside the apartment’s number. Louise had once known a man with the name Jahani. Arman had been a doctoral student in French the year she started at Stockholm University. He’d taught the conversation tutorial she took fall term. She looked at the green paper again. All that was so long ago. He was the second man she’d slept with. Martin still didn’t know about it. She checked her watch. She was on her way out to meet her son, Jonas, for lunch. The metro she wanted to take was due in ten minutes. Arman had come from Iran to study, or maybe he’d come to escape the revolution. She couldn’t recall the details now. The years merged into one another. A bus rushed past on the street, and the blast of hot air stung her neck.

Jonas wanted to try a sushi restaurant he’d heard about. They took a table on the patio. It was September but very warm out. She let him order. Arman had died in the early nineties. He was a professor of French at the university by then, and his death had been noted briefly in the culture section of DN. One of his books about French cognates had caused a minor controversy. His obituary had mentioned two children, she believed, a daughter and a son. Maybe one of them had moved into her building.

“News from home,” she said after the waitress had brought their drinks—water for Jonas, white wine for Louise. Jonas hadn’t lived with Louise and Martin for more than a decade, but she still thought of the apartment as his home. “The apartment across the courtyard finally sold.”

“The neighbor who died?” he said. “Dad mentioned it.” Martin served on the co-op board and would have known about the sale. He rarely shared such information with Louise.

“That’s right,” she said. “Barbro Ekman. Her children had been trying to sell the place for months. You can’t imagine the smell when the body was first discovered.” The apartment, which was one floor lower than her and Martin’s, had been empty since Barbro Ekman died, shortly before Christmas the previous year. Her body was found only after Martin, who’d gone up to the attic storage area on that side of the building to retrieve a box of decorations, smelled the decomposition. The air was sour and rotten, even two floors up. He’d been upset that no one in the building had noticed for so long, that no one who lived closer to Barbro Ekman had been alarmed by the overwhelming stench. “They’re all so selfish,” he’d said. But Louise suspected he was really only upset that he’d been the one to make the discovery.

Jonas took a drink of his water. “Gruesome,” he said.

It had been snowing the day the cleaning company came. She’d watched from her kitchen as they worked. They scrubbed walls and floors, removed furniture. They even took some of the fixtures and appliances from the kitchen. The idea that humans are so unclean on the inside had preoccupied Louise for weeks. “Well,” she told her son, “I can’t imagine what a relief it must be to her family.”

“She was very old,” Louise said. She didn’t know if he was telling the truth or saying this only to annoy her.

From the bedroom on the courtyard side of their apartment there was a clear view of Barbro Ekman’s living room. When Jonas was young, that bedroom had been his. Now Martin used it as an office. She rarely went into the room anymore. Martin was private about so much. “Do you remember the blue light from her window?” she asked Jonas. “How it used to reflect on the flower box?”

“I think so,” he said.

“It used to scare you.”

He tore open the paper wrapping of the chopsticks, pulled them apart, and rubbed them together to smooth the edges.

“It was so easy to explain,” she said. “It was just her television, I always told you. But you never believed me.”

The waitress arrived with two rectangular plates and set them down in the center of the table. Colorful pieces of fish were arranged on each plate. Louise had tried to listen to what Jonas had ordered for them both and to follow along by looking at the pictures in her own menu, but now that the food had arrived she couldn’t tell one piece of fish from another.

Jonas pointed with his chopsticks. “Salmon,” he said. “And yellowtail. Whitefish. Eel on this plate here.”

She’d always disliked eel. Eels could travel great distances out of the water, and she found this disturbing.

“Who bought the apartment?” Jonas asked.

“I only know a name,” Louise said. Arman had been a good teacher. She could still conjugate several French verbs, hear him reading from lists he’d written on the chalkboard: present indicative, present conditional, present subjunctive. She remembered the strangest things. There couldn’t be that many Jahanis in Stockholm. Jonas was thirty-four. Would she feel jealous or relieved if the person in the apartment was close to that age?

She watched her son eat.

He talked about a problem at his office. An e-mail had accidentally been sent to the wrong person, and Jonas found this uncomfortably funny. He’d been in his current position for only a year, and everything he said about his job, positive or negative, surged with fresh excitement.

When they finished, Jonas insisted on paying the check. As he was figuring out the tip, she typed an e-mail on her phone reminding herself to deposit money into his account. [audio url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/220291680"]

She walked him back to work. They said goodbye to each other outside the building’s glass-walled entryway. Jonas vanished into the crowd of office workers. It was remarkable how similar to her son they all looked. It had been the same when he was in school. The children were all identical. Hundreds of them crowded the spaces of his childhood. His soccer matches, ski lessons, piano classes. She’d always been at ease with the idea of being the mother of a child who was like everyone else. It was a relief to exist so close to the middle. There were so many fewer risks. She watched the crowd fill the lobby. They could all be my children, she thought.

She decided to walk home. Systembolaget had a branch near Jonas’s office, and she wanted to buy a bottle of wine. It embarrassed her to buy wine more than twice a week from the same Systembolaget, and she’d been to the location closer to her apartment just the day before. Lately, she’d been interested in South African wines. She picked two bottles of a Cabernet that, according to a sign fastened to the shelf in the store, had ranked very highly in a blind taste test. She paid for the wine, and, as she left the store, she looked up and down the street to see if there was anyone who might recognize her. Then she stuffed the bottles into her purse, concealing what wouldn’t fit all the way in with her scarf, and walked the rest of the way home.

The green piece of paper was still there on the call box, partly obscuring the name Ekman. One corner of the paper curled outward in the heat. With her fingernail, she started to peel the tape off so that she could reposition it over the paper, but she stopped herself.

The stairwell was dark. Someone on the ground floor was playing music very loudly. The sound faded as she climbed the stairs. By the second floor, she could no longer recognize the song.

She set her purse on the kitchen counter. The bottles clinked. It was two, according to the oven clock. Martin was at work. That evening he was going out with colleagues to celebrate his retirement. They were taking him to a karaoke bar. She didn’t expect him to be home until late. Martin was retiring early. They didn’t need the money, and he was bored with work. She opened one of the bottles of wine and poured herself a glass. Sometimes she worried that she was damaging her health. The music was still playing, and it seeped clearly into the kitchen from the open window. She took her wine to the balcony and sat looking out over the courtyard. The curtains in Barbro Ekman’s apartment were drawn, and the apartment was dark. She could hear the music from the ground floor. A new song came on, one she recognized. She mouthed along to a few words of the chorus, took a sip of her wine. The wine tasted good, and the song reminded her of somewhere nice. She couldn’t place the memory exactly, but it made her think of the outdoors, of a beautiful view. There were trees and snow. Maybe the song had played on the radio frequently during a trip they’d once taken.

In the apartment just below Barbro Ekman’s place lived a woman named Johanna. Her two sons were grown now. One of them played ice hockey in America, somewhere in the Southern states, Louise thought—North Carolina, maybe. The other was a lawyer up north, in Kiruna. Louise remembered when the family had moved in. The boys were so young. That was right before Louise had become pregnant with Jonas. She’d liked the family. She’d helped the boys plant a small herb garden on her balcony, because it faced east and got good morning sun.

Once, about a month before Jonas was born, Johanna had asked Louise to babysit the older of her sons. The younger one was very sick, and Johanna hadn’t wanted to take them both to the hospital. Louise wasn’t feeling well herself and didn’t want to catch whatever the boy had. So she volunteered Martin to go in her place.

After barely an hour, he came back. She heard his footsteps in the hall outside their apartment. She heard the front door open and Martin’s heavy tread as he walked to the bedroom. He was tired, he told her, and had forgotten to take a book to read.

“Who’s watching him?” she asked. “Has Johanna come home?” The bed was warm and comfortable, and, silhouetted in the doorway, Martin appeared much larger than he actually was.

“I need to find my book,” he said.

“They have books there,” she said. “And a television.”

“I’m tired, Louise,” he said. Then the shadow of her husband stepped out of the doorway and disappeared into the hall. She heard a door open and close, then the airy creak of leather as he settled into his chair in the living room.

She got out of bed and wrapped herself in her robe. It was the first time she could remember hating her husband. Over the years that had become such a familiar, even comforting, feeling. It was cold out, and she crossed the courtyard as quickly as she could, taking care to avoid an icy patch where the shadow from a first-floor balcony kept the ground wet even in the warmest part of the day.

She could remember so much about that evening, but not what the problem with the younger boy had been. She couldn’t recall Johanna’s coming home. But she distinctly remembered waking up on Johanna’s couch, her throat and stomach on fire with heartburn and hatred for Martin. The next time she saw Johanna, she thought she’d ask her about that night. We all inhabit our memories so differently. Or, rather, our individual memories of shared events can mean such different things. It had something to do with identity, she supposed, but she didn’t feel like chasing after the thought any further.

Louise spent the rest of the afternoon on the balcony or else on the narrow, soft couch in the sitting room, reading. Days passed quickly when she drank. By five o’clock, the sun had dipped behind the building to the west, and the temperature dropped. She had nearly finished the first bottle of wine. When her neighbors started to arrive home from their workdays, she went inside and sat at the kitchen island. She was careful about appearances. Sometimes she threw bottles away in her trash, instead of taking them to the recycling, because she didn’t want her neighbors to see how much she drank.

She fixed herself something to eat and opened the second bottle of wine. She watched the news while she ate. Dusk settled over the courtyard, and by eight it was dark. She turned the television off and took a thin blanket from the couch and returned to the balcony. She wrapped the blanket around her shoulders. Outside the apartment, she could smell her own inside life sharply on the blanket. The courtyard was dark. She tried to find a pattern in the lit-up windows of the building opposite. Two dark, one light. Three light, one dark, three light. Lights went on and off, and she could never get past a third position in the pattern and soon gave up trying. Occasionally, the front door would open loudly and slam shut. The hall light switched on, casting a wide square of light into the courtyard. She heard voices, a television, laughter. Barbro Ekman’s apartment was still dark.

She was the one who’d ended things with Arman. She’d got pregnant, and the idea that the baby might be his had frightened her. Of course, the timing wasn’t quite right. The last time she’d slept with Arman was weeks before the likely conception date. She’d understood this with relief when the midwife had circled the estimated due date on the colorful chart she held in front of Louise and Martin in a cramped exam room at the thirteen-week checkup. Louise felt as if she’d risked something catastrophic and survived. She hadn’t told Arman that she was pregnant. It was better that he didn’t know. Just after the birth, the first time she held Jonas against her chest, feeling the sticky wetness of her own blood on his body, she’d touched his hair, dark, curled wet with blood and amniotic fluid. Until the midwife washed him and gave him back to her, she was terrified that perhaps Jonas was Arman’s after all, that she’d miscalculated some crucial fact.

The heavy front door of the building creaked open. The light in the hall came on. It spilled out into the courtyard, revealing a chair and the sharp contrasts of shadowed corners. The door slammed shut. She listened to footsteps in the stairwell. Her wineglass was empty, and she got up to fill it. In the warmth of the apartment, she felt a chill at her feet. She filled her glass and held the bottle up in front of her to check how much wine was left. Just over half.

She took the bottle with her back to the balcony and sat in the darkness. She was warm and didn’t need the blanket. The lights in Barbro Ekman’s apartment had been turned on. Through the curtains, she saw movement. She watched the windows closely. There were three, spaced evenly from one end of the building to the other. Kitchen, living room, bedroom. There was a bathroom and a small dining room on the other side of the apartment. She knew this because she’d once been inside, years before, to help Barbro Ekman move a painting from the hallway to the bedroom. Barbro Ekman had been dead for eight months. She was a young ghost. Louise watched the figure move from window to window, its dark shape heavy in the living room, where the light was brightest, faint in the bedroom.

Martin wouldn’t be home for hours. He never came home when he said he was going to. She couldn’t remember how Arman Jahani had died. Probably some disease. Most people die in unassuming ways like that. Quiet but painful struggles consisting of medicines and doctor visits, hope established and quickly abandoned. It was so boring. Better to die as Barbro Ekman had. By the time Jonas was two or three, she’d nearly forgotten that she once thought he might be Arman’s son. She couldn’t remember what it had been like to feel any guilt about it. The wine was good, but it had left a sticky film in her mouth, and she didn’t want the rest. She got up to find something else to drink.

In the kitchen, she poured herself a glass of Scotch from the bottle that Martin saved for guests and special occasions. She didn’t like Scotch, particularly, but this tasted good. It stung her throat. She coughed, took another sip. What would it have been like to raise Arman’s son? Without imagining any details, she felt the idea forming, shapely and full, and was able to hold it firmly in her mind for just a moment. But did it matter? Arman was dead. That was the simplest truth of all. Would Martin have figured it out? He’d been a good father, a little distant, a little too rooted in his work, perhaps, but that was normal. Jonas had had a good childhood. She was happy she hadn’t had to carry a lie as big as his life all this time.

She emptied her glass, winced, searched the burn of the Scotch in her throat for pleasure. On the balcony, she filled the empty glass with the rest of the wine and sat in her chair and drank. In Barbro Ekman’s apartment, Arman’s real child was alive. It was funny how her path and Arman’s—such a ridiculous metaphor—had converged. He would have found it amusing. She was sure of it.

The figure appeared in the kitchen, pulled the curtains to one side, and opened the window. Arman had a daughter. Louise watched her sit at the table, the light from the lamp forming a bright circle at its center. She was drinking something from a mug. Coffee or tea, maybe wine, Louise thought.

She and Martin had lived in the building longer than everyone but grouchy old Jan Lindblom down on the ground floor, and Barbro Ekman, of course, before she died. Back in the kitchen, Louise poured another finger of whiskey. It tasted a little like wine, but it wasn’t bad. In the cupboard, she found an unopened package of cookies. Shortbread, the kind Martin liked.

The stairwell was dark. She took the first steps carefully, her hand against the smooth wall as a guide. As she descended, her eyes adjusted and the moonlit courtyard cast its light up into the stairwell, and eventually she could walk without fear of falling. Outside, she looked up at her balcony. The light from her kitchen was inviting, soft orange and yellow. Warm colors. She would never do this sober.

The name was on the mail slot on the door. Jahani. She knocked. Footsteps. The young woman answered. She was beautiful, as far from the middle as Louise’s son was near it. “Hello,” she said.

“I live here,” Louise said.

“I’m sorry?” the young woman said.

“I meant I live in this complex, and I wanted to welcome you.”

“That’s very nice,” the young woman said. “Thank you so much.” She looked back into the apartment. Louise peered in, too. There were open boxes, a tilting stack of blankets and towels, an empty bookcase turned at a funny angle at the end of the hall. “I was unpacking.” She smiled. Louise could tell that she was embarrassed.

Louise smiled back and didn’t budge. “You’ve just moved in,” she said.

“Officially tomorrow,” the young woman said. “Getting a head start. Sara,” she said, and held out her hand.

Louise took it. “Louise,” she said. It was difficult to recall exactly what Arman had looked like. Perhaps she could see him in Sara. But had he been tall? Sara was tall, taller than Louise. He’d had dark hair, and she remembered him as very thin, but also strong. Sinewy was the word for it. He’d had thick veins on his arms. “I live just over there,” she said. She held the box of cookies out to indicate the direction of her apartment.

Sara looked at her.

“Oh, listen to me,” Louise said, handing the cookies to Sara. “These are for you. Welcome.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” Sara said.

“Of course,” Louise said. “I wanted to. You’re one of us now.”

Sara smiled.

Louise’s face and the top of her chest were warm. She touched her fingertips to her throat. “You’ll like living here,” she said.

“I think so, too,” Sara said.

Louise didn’t believe in fate. Every morning she woke up with the thought that that day would be the one when something terrible was destined to happen. She did this because she knew it was impossible to predict what was coming for each of us. Whatever she believed would happen that day she knew would not, owing to our inability to know the future. Lately, she’d been imagining horrific things. Car accidents, robberies, disease. Martin thought it was unhealthy and told her so frequently.

“This is a good area,” she said to the young woman. “We’ve been here for years. It’s very safe.”

Sara fidgeted at the door. “I like this neighborhood. I always have.” She held the cookies in front of her, took a step back into the apartment, smiled politely, and put her hand on the door.

“You could be my daughter,” Louise said.

“Excuse me?” Sara said. She let her hand fall from the door.

“I could have been your mother. I knew your father before you were born.”

Sara squinted a little, turned her head slightly to the left. “You’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

“Your father and I were friends,” Louise said. “We had a relationship.”

“I think you’ve mistaken me for someone.”

Louise reached out and touched Sara’s arm. “It was a long time ago. I was in love with him.”

Sara smiled, and in the smile Louise, even drunk, located judgment. This was how Jonas looked at her; Martin, too. The same sad eyes, the narrow, thin-lipped smile. They pitied her, thought she was ridiculous, incapable, unwell. She hated them all. “A woman died here,” she said.

Sara started to push the door closed. “Thank you again,” she said. “I really should get back to unpacking.”

“She was very old, the woman who lived here before you,” Louise said, stepping forward until she’d nearly entered the apartment. “Her body was found just before Christmas last year. I think she had a stroke.”

“I’m sorry,” Sara said.

“I thought you should know,” Louise said. “I’d want to know.” She put her hand on the door.

“Her name was Barbro,” Louise said. She closed her eyes. “The woman who used to live here. She was very old. I think that’s the best way to go, don’t you? In your sleep, just like that. I don’t want to sit around waiting for it.”

“Can I help you get back home?” Sara said. “Do you think you’ll make it on your own?”

Louise concentrated on holding her head as still as possible. “No,” she said. “It’s just over there.”

In the courtyard, she looked up at Barbro Ekman’s apartment. The blinds were drawn. The light in the front room had been turned out. She was cold. She turned on the light in the stairwell, listened to her shoes click and shuffle against the hard stone. From one of the ground-floor apartments, loud applause and laughter from a television mocked her. She steadied herself with a hand on the cold wall.

She sat at the kitchen island, on one of the tall stools, the wobbly one, and finished the food she’d prepared earlier. She ate most of a piece of bread with too much butter and drank more Scotch. Arman Jahani had not had a daughter. She was sure of this. It was late, and she was tired. Martin would be home soon, and she wanted to be in bed before he arrived. She stood up to pour herself a glass of milk. Milk soothed her stomach. She would be hungover in the morning, but she didn’t care. She reached for a glass on the far side of the counter, and, as she leaned forward, she brushed the plate off the counter and to the floor. Shattered fragments of china pricked her bare feet.

The plate was not a plate. It was only dozens of pieces of thick ceramic, the patterned lines and shapes disrupted, taken apart, put back together to form something new. She got down on her knees and moved the largest piece to one side and began to place the smaller pieces on top. The edges were sharp, and she held each piece as tenderly as possible.

She knew it was Martin before he even opened the door. And when he entered the room she didn’t need to look up to see that she’d been right. “I’ve made a mess,” she said. She pushed the plate aside and picked up a bit of bread with her fingertips and put the bread in her mouth.

“You don’t have to do that,” Martin said. “Please. I’ll get it later.”

“Forgive me.”

“I’ll help you to bed,” Martin said.

“You should have stayed, Martin. You could have stayed. It wasn’t difficult.” She felt his hand on her head. He probably didn’t know what night she was talking about, but that didn’t matter. She leaned forward, devoted, filling her mouth with the bread as if she were kneeling at the altar of a darkened church. ♦